Social Media

Not to be outdone by Facebook Timeline, Google+ redesigns its layout. In related news, no one notices.

Google+ launched with a bang, reaching 50 million users in no time. Then 90 million, but many people weren’t seeing a lot of activity in their news stream. A report recently came out finding that the average Google+ user only spends 3 minutes per month on the site compared to 405 on Facebook, 98 on Pinterest and Tumblr, 21 on Twitter, 17 on Linkedin, and yes, even MySpace gets more attention with 8 minutes per month.

Enter this week’s complete redesign. The new look adds a bit of customization and borrows a whole lot more.

We’re pretty sure the ancient Greek philosopher wasn’t directly talking about Facebook, but we can apply it anyway. Facebook’s most recent change is the “Timeline” design. You may have already switched over to the new layout for your personal profile, and if you haven’t, you will be forced to soon enough. On March 30th, your company’s Facebook page will also be forced to adopt a variation of the Timeline design.

If you are on Twitter, you have probably seen the trending topic #NewNewTwitter the last few days. Twitter has started unveiling their second redesign of the website this year. We’ve talked about the tremendous importance of a Facebook Page and a Google+ Page for your business, but now Twitter is getting in the mix with a new redesign that includes special brand pages. Before this update, company Twitter accounts had the same layout as personal accounts, which didn’t help the confusion users had with the existence of so many false identities.

If you’re a FreedomVoice customer, you may have noticed FreedomVoice has liked your fan page and started following you on Twitter. We want to know more about our customers and their businesses so that we can better connect online. However, we’ve noticed a lot of small businesses don’t have a Facebook fan page but are instead using personal profiles for business connections.

We think having a personal profile is great; there’s no better way to stay connected to family and friends online. For a business though, a fan page has tremendous benefits:

One of the biggest trends in social media is for companies to “be human.” Meaning businesses should show a softer, compassionate and even humorous side of themselves to better engage with their audience. For the most part, businesses are getting much better at showing a personality. However, our list of the top 5 Twitter blunders of 2011(so far) display both simple mistakes and errors of judgment which made the audience question the author’s personality altogether. Without further ado, our top Twitter blunders thus far in 2011 in chronological order: